Salvador Dali, lying on his deathbed in a stupor, is said to have been fed thousands of sheets of blank paper to sign for fake lithographs.
Film is probably the medium best suited to reach the most people - the visual, the aural, the limbic, the intellectual: it captures all these parts of our mind and soul. No other art form comes close.
Serious collectors and art experts, among the world's most educated, often cannot fathom the possibility of being rooked, and then once taken, cannot face the humiliation of admitting it.
Life only has narrative when we frame it and edit it and call it certain things.
When it came to 'Concussion,' I found myself with so many threads to weave. So integral to the whistle-blower's tale were spirituality, the cost of hero-worshipping, what it means to be an American, and just how dangerous the truth can be.
Most editors are just worried about their jobs. They're overwhelmed. They're underpaid. They do the best they can.
Like every other industry or institution, the journalism world is populated by the petty and fearful, in addition to the courageous and brilliant.
There was absolutely zero discourse between me or anybody at the studio with the NFL. None. The only exchange was one-sentence e-mails trying to arrange a meeting, before deciding to cancel the meeting. Period. End of story.
Documentaries for me always felt kind of limiting. I wanted to go bigger. And I also love actors, and I love performance. So feature filmmaking was always the intent.
I had a very strong background in journalism, so it's my instinct to try to be as fair and accurate as possible.
Each year, tens of millions of museumgoers walk through the entrance of the Getty, or the Metropolitan or the Prado or the Hermitage, and never consider the possibility of having to arbitrate for themselves the authenticity of what they have come to see.
Once you turn on the camera, making a movie is making a movie. I don't care if it's $9 million dollars or $50 million dollars. You have bigger toys, bigger set, actors who are better paid, but once you turn on the camera, it's director and performance, and I don't find a big difference.
Refugees tend to avoid planes, airports and fake passports, even though flying may appear to be the most obvious way to flee. For one thing, security procedures at airports are far stricter than at land borders.
I can't worry about the consequences of what I do; that's not my job.
There's a constant dialogue going back and forth between the filmmakers and the producers.
When a director is also a writer, everyone on the production looks to him, knowing he gave birth to the idea. There's a different level of viability.
My personal sources in the intelligence community and the military are very good. They're excellent. I have very high-up, in-depth sources.